Was James Toney the most naturally talented middleweight ever?

Toney started boxing at 11, began to focus on it at about 18, turned pro at 20. He was taught everything by Bill Miller, a criminally overlooked genius of a teacher. It isn't at all like Toney just showed up like that.

 

Steroid cheat...

 

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Awesome post.

 

In a weight where you can find names like ray robinson, monzón, hagler, leonard... and the like, I think that you are saying too much, dude.

 

James always said, “Other men learn to fight, I was born knowing...”

 

Yes, probably ray robinson had no natural talent... or monzon, or hagler who was naturally skilled with both hands....

what the f, dude...

 

Agreed. Real loose definition of 'natural talent' required to rate JT above RJJ and other contemporaries. He was great at not losing rather than winning imo.

 

Of course we can know. We DO know.

When you go to a gym, and your trainer begins to teach you how to box "by the book", what he's actually doing is to teach you to mimic sugar ray robinson's style. Every boxer in the world has been taught to mimic ray robinson when he starts boxing. There is boxing before ray, and boxing after ray. But you know what? nobody taught ray robinson to mimic ray robinson, because, well, you know, he was ray robinson. It was inside him already. What every fighter in the world is instructed to do, ray robinson had it inside "by default".

Imho SRR is the most natural talent ever, he was born in the middle of "old school boxing" but he had "modern boxing" inside him, and even if I usually like to defend that he would loose to more modern fighters like floyd (for instance, just to say a name) I defend too that he's the #1p4p fighter ever with no discussion.

 

Any world class fighter has both natural talent and skills honed through thousands of hours of practice.

I view "talent" as what a fighter's ceiling is, but the skills are the ladder to reach it. You can have a 20 foot ladder of skills but it's worthless if you're too slow, can't take a punch, have no sense of timing or accuracy, etc. The ceilings too low to get much use out of it.

Toney was clearly was a gifted fighter, but he did have athletic limitations at the top level that would stop me from having him in that discussion as most talented ever.

 

Steroids didn`t teach him the shoulder roll.